Dan Smith's bloghttp://dansmithsblog.com
Analysis & commentary on world issuesSun, 26 Jul 2015 18:07:31 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://0.gravatar.com/blavatar/ada17fbd25d839c20d95d48f326850a5?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngDan Smith's bloghttp://dansmithsblog.com
Bombing ISIS won’t stop ithttp://dansmithsblog.com/2015/07/03/bombing-isis-wont-stop-it/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/07/03/bombing-isis-wont-stop-it/#commentsFri, 03 Jul 2015 12:25:54 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1904Continue reading →]]>Britain has had a national minute of silence today to remember the victims – including 30 Britons killed – of the beachside massacre in Sousse, Tunisia, last week. Then it will be back to politics as usual, which means discussing when to bomb in Syria. God help us.

The record so far

The Middle East has more wars going on today than at any time since it entered its modern age in the 1940s and ‘50s with independence from the colonial and mandate powers, the foundation of Israel, and the discovery of oil in commercial quantities. The lethality level of today’s wars is matched in that 70-year period only by the 1980s when Iran and Iraq were at war and Lebanon was collapsing. But today, networks capable of causing terror are more developed than they have ever been, and reach further around the world both in recruiting activists and in their capacity to inflict harm.

Whatever it was that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair sought to achieve when they invaded Iraq without UN approval in 2003, ostensibly to find and render safe weapons of mass destruction that by then no longer existed, it was not this. What President Bush called a war on terror has succeeded only in producing both.

Likewise, whatever President Sarkozy and Prime Minister Cameron, supported somewhat tepidly by President Obama, intended when they intervened in Libya to overthrow Qadaffi, it was not a situation in which 1,800 militia forces rampage across the country.

In short, both interventions, both dubbed successes by over-hasty leaders, have failed completely and, whether measured in economic resources or in death and misery, expensively.

And now, it seems, the British government wants to do it again.

Do something – but what?

To state a few things that are obvious:

ISIS commits atrocities on a massive scale;

The people in the Middle East and neighbouring regions including ourselves have the right to live in security;

What happened in Sousse was horrific;

Something must be done.

But while the impulse to do so something is understandable, that does not mean keeping on doing things that were part of what has created this awful situation.

The frequently used argument that we must fight ISIS “over there” or else we will have to fight them “over here” is laughable. We will have to fight ISIS over here precisely because our government bombs them over there. There will be more massacres of the unprotected and innocent as a result.

Last year, speaking at the UN, David Cameron said, “No to rushing to join a conflict without a clear plan.” Fine, but this year he talks of crushing ISIS. Others say, ‘Smash it.’ The trouble is that experience shows that’s not how it works. Weaken ISIS and another group will emerge to take its place. If in doubt, consider what has happened since US forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Few options, no answers

I do not have the answer to put on the table: do this and it’s problem solved. Nobody does. I doubt there is such an answer. The patient search for a political settlement, which in general terms is the obvious alternative to military action, is no miracle cure. The strife now has such deep roots that more pain for the region and its neighbours is inevitable. But that is no reason to keep on doing what has failed before, doing what has, in fact, exacerbated the problem as Middle East regional security has deteriorated to an all-time low.

There are few good options available. It is true for those of us on the side lines and those in the political furnace. If not bombing, then what? – that’s the outsiders’ narrow menu. For Middle Easterners, the issue is sharper. Between what seemed like competing prospects of chaos and stability, many Egyptians, who had taken the risk of demonstrating and standing up for freedom and democracy in 2011, chose two years later to support the overthrow of the democratically elected President and his replacement by the head of the military. And while the choice between ISIS and Sisi in Egypt – and comparable choices elsewhere – is unappetising, the outsiders – the Western powers, the Gulf States, Russia – do little to help.

It is as easy to insist on a political settlement in Syria or in Libya as it is to talk of crushing ISIS. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS gives every indication of denying the legitimacy of compromise, so the concept of settlement would be out of bounds. In Libya, where ISIS is present but far from dominant, there could (and, for their own self-interest, should) be more possibility of arriving at an initial settlement between the Dawn and Dignity rivals.

But while a political approach may not be more successful, there is a difference: it will do less harm.

]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/07/03/bombing-isis-wont-stop-it/feed/2dansmithxzGender, peace, security, slavery and cigaretteshttp://dansmithsblog.com/2015/06/11/gender-peace-security-slavery-and-cigarettes/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/06/11/gender-peace-security-slavery-and-cigarettes/#commentsThu, 11 Jun 2015 03:00:32 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1894Continue reading →]]>One year on from the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, the senior UN official on the issue, Zainab Bangura, has said in an interview with AFP that Yazidi and other young women abducted by ISIS in Syria and Iraq are being traded “for as little as a pack of cigarettes.”

The summit

Even if it has happened only once, even if it is not actually factual but is just a story she’s been told, it tells you something awful is happening. You could not want a sharper reminder about the issue. The global summit on sexual violence in conflict was held in London 10-12 June 2014. Hosted by the UK Foreign Office under William Hague, it headlined all round the world not only because of the issue but thanks to the presence and work of Angelina Jolie. As the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Zainab Bangura co-signed the “Statement of Action” with Hague and Jolie.

The summit’s focus on sexual violence in conflict could easily be questioned for its narrowness. The issue is wider and deeper: what happens in war is largely a reflection of social and cultural issues that are real before and after war. But then ISIS swaggers in with sexual slavery to accompany beheadings and mass killings and we are reminded what it’s all about.

This week is also the first anniversary of the UK’s third National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, which focuses British efforts on six countries – Afghanistan, Burma, Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Somalia and Syria. The government reports annually on progress on the NAP so it will be interesting to see what progress it believes it can register in those six, hyper-demanding and dangerous environments. It will be especially interesting to see if progress is being maintained now William Hague has left the Foreign Office.

Recruiting ISIS fighters

One aspect of that pack-of-cigarettes story is that it is, so Zainab Bangura argues, part of the ISIS recruitment strategy to have girls available for use, especially to attract foreign fighters. Facing up to that underlines the point that what is going on here – or in any other war where women, girls, and often boys and men are sexually brutalised – is about more than the war. It is about how boys grow up and what assumptions we carry with us as we do so.

The diversity of men’s behaviour shows that in all societies, young men have a variety of models of masculinity. Selection between them is not wholly conscious ; we are drawn to one, or another, or a blend. Choice is part of it but not the whole story.

In traditional and pervasive models, there is heavy emphasis on being the provider, the protector, the achiever, the stalwart and the strong. Pondering the Charlie Hebdo killings earlier this year, it seemed to me that these roles are an increasing burden. They simply do not gel with much of social reality and it takes an ever more desperate act to sustain them. Seeking the sexual object to abuse, whether through online grooming in Britain, or with a pack of cigarettes in Syria, or in sexual abuse of children by UN soldiers in the Central African Republic, seems to me to be a perverse response that desperation produces at the margin.

The response: focus or go broad?

By way of response, there is not really a choice between focusing on sexual violence in war/conflict on the one hand and on broader issues on the other. The perpetrators of crimes of sexual violence in war should of course be arrested, tried with due process and punished if convicted. In other words, there is a policing element in the campaign against sexual violence in war and conflict. The same is true of course for sexual criminality in times of peace. However, to achieve sustainable change over the long term, it is self-evident that much more is needed.

Among the many preparations going on for October’s 15th anniversary of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, this week sees the publication of a new book, Gender, Peace and Security looking at the implementation of UNSCR 1325. It’s available at the eye-watering price of $145.00 so get a friendly think tank or university library to order it because it is very well researched and a more than worthwhile read as it tracks the mixed record of 1325 implementation.

There, however – right there in that last sentence – is the source of a necessary reservation. It’s about the implementation of a resolution. Do not interpret me as saying it is unimportant when I add that, to quote myself one paragraph ago, to achieve sustainable change over the long term, it is self-evident that much more is needed. Put another way, the change that is registered in implementing a UN resolution makes most sense if it is in a larger context of change.

Gender and peace

In International Alert, our way of approaching this has been to explore what works best for peacebuilding on the ground. For us, it’s not just a question of dealing with sexual violence in time of war but of building a peaceful future. It is not just about getting the UN and national governments to agree but of energising people to do the building.

The participation of women is important but what is it that makes it happen, and makes it happen so it makes a difference? So it’s not just a box-ticking exercise or an act of organised hypocrisy in which women are allowed to participate but only in the unimportant things?

The answer lies, surely, in how gender roles are fulfilled, understood and moderated over time. For want of a better term, we call this a gender relational approach. To make progress, it means engaging people in thinking about and discussing those models of masculinity and femininity and seeing what they can do to handle the ways in which those models may encourage violent, victimising and victimised behaviour. Part of that process by which one model of masculinity shape’s a young man’s identity rather than another is open to choice and therefore to influence. When International Alert explored experience on the ground, we found a perhaps surprising number of peacebuilding activities that address these questions in engaging, creative and nuanced ways.

If we keep on making progress on all these fronts – policing sexual criminality in war and peace, implementing the resolution, working together to build peace – we can have some confidence about two things. Our societies will be more equal and fewer young men will act out perverse effects of desperation. It is a big task, of course; all the best ones are.

]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/06/11/gender-peace-security-slavery-and-cigarettes/feed/1dansmithxzPeacebuilding: the importance of institutionshttp://dansmithsblog.com/2015/05/27/peacebuilding-the-importance-of-institutions/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/05/27/peacebuilding-the-importance-of-institutions/#commentsWed, 27 May 2015 15:11:17 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1891Continue reading →]]>The Conflict, Security and Development Conference is run by students at King’s College London. This year they asked me along to give the closing keynote and thoughtfully interviewed me beforehand so I could run through some of my main points. The interview falls into three sections: the first is on the central importance of institutions in building peace, the second on the role of NGOs like International Alert, and the third on the sort of challenges to peace and security that lie ahead, the compound risks we face in the coming decade and beyond.
]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/05/27/peacebuilding-the-importance-of-institutions/feed/1dansmithxzTake care aiding Nepalhttp://dansmithsblog.com/2015/04/29/take-care-aiding-nepal/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/04/29/take-care-aiding-nepal/#commentsWed, 29 Apr 2015 04:00:42 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1885Continue reading →]]>We have all been shocked by the earthquake that hit Nepal and the region last Saturday. Now the aid effort is starting up. International Alert has put out a statement gently raising the warning signs: humanitarian aid can go wrong if the aiders don’t take into account the full reality on the ground.

But if aid is given as if the only important thing about Nepal right now is that it has experienced a major earthquake, then there is, sadly, every possibility that the mistakes of post-tsunami aid to Sri Lanka and post-quake aid to Haiti will be repeated.

The country is still suffering the effects of its 10-year civil war, which ended in 2006 when the monarchy was also ended. Nine years on, peacebuilding is a continuing need, governance has not been sorted out and a new constitution is yet to be agreed.

The causes of the civil war included bad governance, lack of political voice, failures of development, and discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, religion and caste. These have not yet been fully addressed. Relationships between some communities remain strained. Government is not efficient and there is already anger at the pace at which the government is delivering aid to those who need it most.

Worse, corruption is an endemic problem, which always makes emergency aid difficult. And alongside straightforward corruption is the way political parties manoeuvre for advantage. Many government activities and policies are managed at least in part on the basis of the short-term, sectional advantage they offer to one group or another, rather than for long-term benefit to the common good.

All this means that the distribution of relief will be highly sensitive and may cause grievances or make existing ones worse, grievances that are not always visible to a superficial glance. International Alert has been working in Nepal since 2001 so we have some knowledge. The window for delivering humanitarian aid purely on the basis of need will probably not open very wide or for very long. When the most immediate needs have been met, unless the conflict and governance issues are taken into account by those delivering aid, the window is likely to slam shut.

Humanitarian agencies can try to deliver aid on the do-no-harm basis by being aware of and sensitive to the context of conflict. To do this, they must get to a good understanding of the context – and quickly. It is not easy but there are many people in Nepal who can help them work it out.

They would do even better to let aid actually enhance peace prospects through early recovery initiatives that bridge traditional divides and foster social cohesion. Relief needs to be inclusive and delivered in ways that minimise politicisation and corruption. That would help ensure Nepal’s sustainable recovery from the impact of the earthquake as well as from the aftermath of war.

]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/04/29/take-care-aiding-nepal/feed/0dansmithxzClimate change and security: here’s the analysis, when’s the action?http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/04/22/climate-change-and-security-heres-the-analysis-whens-the-action/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/04/22/climate-change-and-security-heres-the-analysis-whens-the-action/#commentsWed, 22 Apr 2015 04:00:06 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1872Continue reading →]]>Last week’s communiqué from the G7 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Lübeck included a statement on climate change and security. In welcoming a report, A New Climate for Peace, to which my organisation International Alert contributed, the communiqué moves the issue forward and declares it to be worthy of high level political attention. Unfortunately, what is to be done is not so clear.

The core message is that climate change is having a multi-faceted impact on many states, societies and communities. It exerts a pressure they cannot tolerate for long. Compound risks emerge as the impact of climate change interacts with other political, social and economic problems. Climate change makes it hard to build resilience in the state or even in local communities, while the fragility of the state makes it hard to adapt to the impact of climate change. To address this problem, a new approach is needed integrating sectors that are currently separate, energised by clear political leadership to develop international cooperation, based on dialogue about a shared challenge and shared goals.

This is not a rehash of positions in the tired old controversy about whether climate change causes armed conflict. With this report, presented to the German Foreign Minister, and with the G7 Foreign Ministers’ welcome for it the next day, it is possible to say that the debate has decisively moved on.

The issue, if we want some jargon, is human security and insecurity. A background of armed conflict or weak governance or political instability – or all in combination – in short, a situation of fragility is not conducive for building resilience against the negative impact of climate change. Likewise, the pressure of climate change makes the tasks of reconciliation, managing conflicts non-violently and building a peaceful state even harder than they are in the absence of that pressure.

Most of the research team presenting A New Climate for Peace to German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, 14 April 2015

Seven compound risks

The report – 150 pages long in final draft – pulls together the best recent research and adds the results of its own inquiries in vulnerable countries. It collates the evidence and focuses on seven compound risks:

Local resource competition can lead, as pressure on natural resources increases, to instability and even violent conflict in the absence of effective dispute resolution.

Livelihood insecurity is a likely result of climate change in some regions, which could push people to migrate or turn to illegal sources of income.

Extreme weather events and disasters will exacerbate all the challenges of fragility and can increase people’s vulnerability and grievances, especially in conflict-affected situations.

Volatility in the prices and availability of food, arising because climate variability disrupts food production, have well documented effects on the likelihood of protests, instability, and civil conflict.

Transboundary water sharing is a source of either cooperation or tension, but as competition sharpens due to increasing demand and declining availability and quality of water, the balance of probability tilts towards increased tension and conflict.

Sea-level rise and coastal degradation will threaten the viability of low-lying areas, with the potential for social disruption and displacement, while disagreements over maritime boundaries and ocean resources may increase.

The unintended effects of climate policies are a further source of risk that will increase if climate adaptation and mitigation policies are more broadly implemented without due care and attention to consequences and negative spin-offs.

Responding to risk

The best and, long term, the sustainable way to diminish the threat posed by these climate-fragility risks is to slow down climate change by reducing carbon emissions. That’s the task for December’s climate summit in Paris – formally, the 21st Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But changes to the climate are already underway, so there has to be a separate and additional response to climate-fragility risks, starting now and carried through for – in the best case – some decades at least.

Three key sectors require action – climate change adaptation, development and humanitarian aid, and peacebuilding. But single sector action won’t work against compound risk. Virtually by definition, integrated approaches are necessary. Further, the problem faced does not respect national boundaries and is in any case too big and too complex for a single government to handle, so the response needs also to be internationally cooperative and coordinated.

A response to the vicious cycle contained in each of the seven climate-fragility risks will not work if it relies on responding to each crisis as it arrives. What people in the hardest hit countries need is assistance in mounting and implementing a long-term and sustained preventive response. That’s how we move from managing crises to avoiding them.

The current menu of action

A New Climate for Peace looks at the current international policy architecture for addressing the compound risks. There is plenty of activity but:

What needs to be done

Many things can and should be done. It is not hard to identify them. The report insists that it will only happen if there is strong and clear political leadership. With the G7 governments in mind, it identifies entry points for developing a coordinated, integrated approach:

Within G7 member governments, remember that integration begins at home and make climate-fragility risks a central foreign policy priority.

Improve coordination among G7 members by coming together for a new dialogue.

Set the global resilience agenda by bringing the new integrated approach to global and multilateral discussions and institutions.

Extend the dialogue by listening to and working with a wide range of actors, including in countries affected by fragility.

And to embody this new approach, as areas in which it could be implemented, the report identifies five action areas:

Strengthening global risk assessment by covering all aspects and making the results available and accessible;

Checking and strengthening the institutions and agreements that can help settle transboundary water disputes;

Recalibrating development strategies and international development assistance so as to give greater priority to building local resilience.

But where to start?

There is, then, no real difficulty in identifying what action to take and how to do it. The likely objection to the list of action areas is only that it is incomplete. The challenge is, how to start?

Here is what the G7 communiqué says:

“We therefore welcome the external study, commissioned by the G7 Foreign Ministries in 2014 and now submitted to us under the title “An New Climate for Peace: Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks” …

“We agree on the need to better understand, identify, monitor and address the compound risks associated with climate change and fragility…

“We have decided to set up and task a working group with evaluating the study’s recommendations up to the end of 2015 in order for it to report back to us regarding possible implementation in time for our meeting in 2016.”

Start here – we’ve been invited to

It is not exactly a clarion call for path breaking action. It lacks the necessary political juice. But it is an open invitation to keep pressing.

The first part of the case – that there is a major global problem – has now been made and is grounded in solid evidence. With this, virtually as a corollary, goes the second part of the case: business as usual is not an option, change is needed.

The third part of the case – there are many things that can usefully be done to alleviate and manage the compound climate-fragility risks – has also been made.

It is the fourth part of the case – now is the time – that has to be made and has to persuade. Let’s get to it.

A New Climate for Peace – Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks

]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/04/22/climate-change-and-security-heres-the-analysis-whens-the-action/feed/2dansmithxzMost of the research team presenting A New Climate for Peace to German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, 14 April 2015A New Climate for Peace - Taking Action on Climate and Fragility RisksExtremism, prevention, global inequality, ISIS and migrationhttp://dansmithsblog.com/2015/02/20/extremism-prevention-global-inequality-isis-and-migration/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/02/20/extremism-prevention-global-inequality-isis-and-migration/#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 05:00:00 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1866Continue reading →]]>Events in the Middle East continue to horrify and escalate in equal measure. Last week Jordan vowed all manner of action against ISIS in Syria for burning a pilot alive, this week Egypt bombed ISIS in Libya for beheading 21 Coptic Christians. At the same time, President Obama convened an international meeting on extremism with the emphasis on prevention and the idea took hold that ISIS would infiltrate people-trafficking boats in the Mediterranean. Arise TV in London were good enough to invite me to hold forth for a few minutes on both Obama and ISIS. We covered a fair amount of ground in 6 minutes:

Arise aired about 15-20 minutes of Obama’s speech to the conference right up until the point where the video clip starts. In lots of ways it is not at all a bad speech and, frankly, far more subtle and balanced than what it feels like I’ve been hearing in Europe for a while now.

But he didn’t talk about the issue I raised in the Arise studio – the need for the West to change so the world becomes less grotesquely unequal. And he didn’t go into the other issue: the wars the West has launched in recent times and the mess the West has made as a result. And I continue that unless we manage to look at ourselves and see what needs to change, which means being open-eyed and honest about the errors we have made, some of them egregious and some downright criminal – without that, I don’t see how the West can cease being part of the problem and start to be part of the solution.

Is there a way out? Yes – because people are always looking for a path to peace. Before going down to the Arise studio I was helping launch a new Syrian Platform for Peace. In the panel discussion we tackled the thorny question: can something like this do any good. And I think it is no exaggeration to say that for all the Syrians present the answer was clear, that both in short-term practical assistance to people who need it, and in the longer term by laying now the seeds for peace and building a constituency for peace, it is possible for an initiative such as this to do a great deal of good .

It was an inspiring evening and I think that was what gave me the confidence to talk about my view of how it could be possible for Libyans to build peace in Libya.

_________

NB: Listening to myself, when saying how many militias there are in Libya, it seems like I said 18 when what I meant to say was 1,800.

]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/02/20/extremism-prevention-global-inequality-isis-and-migration/feed/1dansmithxzJordan and ISIS: more bombing, less peacehttp://dansmithsblog.com/2015/02/10/jordan-and-isis-more-bombing-less-peace/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/02/10/jordan-and-isis-more-bombing-less-peace/#commentsTue, 10 Feb 2015 14:37:39 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1859Continue reading →]]>Last week when ISIS burned the Jordanian pilot, Moaz al-Kassasbeh, and Jordan responded by hanging two prisoners already sentenced to death for crimes committed as part of al-Qa’eda, Arise TV in London asked me to comment. Here’s the part of The World programme I was on:

The reaction of wanting to lash out is understandable but will it help? Is it possible, as the pilot’s distraught father has demanded, to “annihilate” ISIS? For if it is not possible, the result will only be to stoke the fire.

Indeed, there are reasons for thinking that Jordan’s reaction may be counter-productive. One short term result could be to bring ISIS closer together with al-Nusra – the al-Qa’eda group with which ISIS broke and which it has been fighting. Each step further into the morass of escalation of this complex conflict makes it harder to find a way out.

Pictures of Kobani show how much destruction air power can achieve and the Kurdish peshmerga fighter in the picture looks over a town ISIS has vacated.

Yet ISIS has only gone into the hills a few miles away and could be back to torture the town even further at any time.

Despite the pain ISIS has unleashed, and despite its fighters being driven out of Kobani, it still seems to be true that only a political solution will work.

Defeating a group such as ISIS through armed force may drive its adherents underground. It may even obliterate the organisation. But if the conditions that produced it persist, then something like it will re-emerge.

And, to date, the lesson of the Middle East and North Africa is that after every defeat of a militant group, another yet more militant group emerges. Precisely because the conditions persist.

If we can sympathise with a Jordanian father demanding that his son’s killers be annihilated, we may do best to interpret that as a plea to get to grips with eliminating the problem so there is no more ISIS and no successor group.

But that means thinking much more thoroughly about the region, its capacities and its problems – including the role of outside powers – than either the regions rulers or their external allies want to.

]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/02/10/jordan-and-isis-more-bombing-less-peace/feed/2dansmithxzKobaniPlanetary Boundaries and the risks we run as we cross themhttp://dansmithsblog.com/2015/01/26/planetary-boundaries-and-the-risks-we-run-as-we-cross-them/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/01/26/planetary-boundaries-and-the-risks-we-run-as-we-cross-them/#commentsMon, 26 Jan 2015 05:30:02 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1851Continue reading →]]>The Stockholm Resilience Centre has produced a new study of the planetary boundaries, a concept it first unleashed on the planet in 2009. It reveals a worsening situation. It has received considerable media attention as an issue of environmental impact. But it is much more than that.

Boundaries of sustainability

The idea of the planetary boundaries, of which the Stockholm Centre identifies nine, is that these are the boundaries of a sustainable world. Staying within them makes the world liveable. In 2009, a large team of scientific authors concluded humanity had breached three of them. The new study says we have broken through four.

The nine boundaries are:

Climate change

Change in biospheric integrity (loss of biodiversity and extinction of species)

I have re-ordered them compared to how they are arranged in the Centre’s summary to make it neater. In this list,

The first four are the boundaries humanity has transgressed – the climate, the biosphere, key chemical balances and land;

The fifth – ocean acidification – looks likely to be the next one we will bust through;

The sixth – fresh water – is, by the standards of the first five, not too bad;

The seventh – the ozone layer – is the one that’s moving in the right direction, becoming more sustainable;

The last two have not yet been quantified so we don’t know how we’re doing.

Not a pretty picture, is it? –

In this illustrative representation of the concept and the analysis (and, not to boast, but there is a better one in my The State of the World Atlas, based on the 2009 study), the blue ring illustrates the planetary boundary. From there out to the red ring is what the study’s authors call the zone of uncertainty. Beyond the zone of uncertainty is certain danger. We are in that extreme zone, the study says, on biogeochemical flows and the integrity of the biosphere; we are in the zone of uncertainty with climate change and land system change.

The world we have known till now – indeed, the one we have known for the 11,700 years of the Holocene epoch – is the one inside the blue ring and in the safe zone. As we start to transgress the boundaries of sustainability, we get into unknown territory. We don’t know what it’s like out there on the other side of the planetary boundaries. And in particular, we don’t know what happens if we cross all those frontiers.

Conflict risk

Last year, writing about what I have called the ‘conflict horizon’, I identified long-term pressures on the planet’s habitability as one of the underlying factors increasing conflict risk over the coming two decades. The most commonly (and rightly) cited environmental pressure is climate change but the interplay with the other environmental pressures is also important and potentially destabilising.

In the context of conflict risk, what matters with climate change and the other pressures on the boundaries of sustainability is not the source or the form of the pressure alone but the response we manage to mobilise. The challenge from nature, which is resulting from the pressure humanity has put upon it, is a challenge for how we organise ourselves and run things. In more formal language, it is a challenge for governance and for our social, economic and political institutions.

As the basic conditions of life become more difficult, the risk of countries will be highest in those countries where inequality is sharpest and conflict management institutions are weakest.

Pressure on the boundaries of sustainability is increasing the risk. We have to ease the pressure. We have to adapt to the consequences we cannot avoid. We will find both more straightforward if we also find ways ease the other factors increasing conflict risk.

Inequality: Linked problems, linked responses

There has also been considerable press coverage recently of a new Oxfam report about inequality forecasting that by next year one per cent of the world’s population will own half the world’s wealth. Everybody seems to be getting the message about inequality these days; even the head of the IMF has said it threatens democracy and hampers economic growth.

With concern about inequality becoming so respectable, it’s time to be sure that we get conflict into the frame. As a tweet from Gary Slutkin the CEO of Cure Violence put it, ‘Inequity is to violence as dirty water is to diarrhoea.’

The environment is not just an environmental issue. Conflict is not just a peace issue. Building resilience means addressing human impact on the environment, of course, and more besides. It sounds a daunting challenge but the good news is that you can look at it the other way round. Building resilience, building peace and meeting the governance challenge are essentially the same activity.

]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/01/26/planetary-boundaries-and-the-risks-we-run-as-we-cross-them/feed/1dansmithxzPlanetary Boundaries 2015Homerton and Hebdo: thoughts on violence in and from the marginshttp://dansmithsblog.com/2015/01/13/homerton-and-hebdo-thoughts-on-violence-in-and-from-the-margins/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/01/13/homerton-and-hebdo-thoughts-on-violence-in-and-from-the-margins/#commentsTue, 13 Jan 2015 05:00:36 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1842Continue reading →]]>On Wednesday last week as the world knows, three men attacked the staff of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing twelve people and wounding eight. The night before a 17-year-old was murdered just off the high street in Homerton, east London, about 15 minutes’ walk from where I live.

In and around Paris, by the end of Friday, the death toll had reached 20, including two of the three killers, plus a third man, who himself had killed five more.

This is horrible yet it is massively over-shadowed in viciousness and misery by the massacre of 2,000 by Boko Haram in Baga, Nigeria, and by their use of children as suicide bombers. The world of politics and media can be very selective in what few horrors it prioritises among the many available.

But over the weekend I found myself mostly thinking not about the large scale horrors but about last Tuesday’s teenage death, probably for no better reason than that it was closest to home.

Put the knives down

Reportedly, the boy got in a fight, was chased into a side road and was stabbed three times. Reportedly, it was gang related. The newspaper ran with his family’s view of him: an excellent student, he had got in with “the wrong crowd”. He had given up an earlier ambition to do business studies at university. His uncle went from his own particular reason for grief to the general, telling teenagers in gangs to get out: “Just put the knives down and concentrate on education.”

In London, by Friday, this year’s murder toll was nine in nine days. In London, knife crime and other killings do happen but we are not accustomed to one a day.

Not the murder alone but what the dead boy’s uncle said got me thinking about my own son, aged five. He’s in Year One at a really good Hackney primary school. The school where the dead boy used to go is one of the two obvious choices for secondary schooling in our neighbourhood. I don’t have fears about my son and gangs but, to be honest, I could well worry about where some of his friends could be in ten to twelve years’ time.

Pressures on the young

Why? At least three pressures. One is social and economic marginalisation, which means exclusion from the goods that many in modern society take for granted. Another is growinginequality, and the increasing gap between hope and expectation on the one hand and likely reality on the other. I don’t think I am being complacent when I say that some of my son’s friends may be more vulnerable to those pressures than he, and more vulnerable than some of his other friends. It’s a very mixed school.

And the third pressure I’m talking about is exerted on young men by models of masculinity – of what it is to be a man – that are based on the idea of man as the provider, the protector, the achiever, the stalwart and the strong. These models are pervasive. They fly in the face of social reality and it takes an ever more desperate act to sustain them.

Of course, that pressure of masculinity is also felt – and acutely – by girls. Some become the direct and indirect victims of the sexual aggression and predation that it leads to, and some are damaged almost as much by assuming the role of the compliant, complicit survivor in an aggressively male-run reality.

International Alert has been looking at some of this. A Peace Focus paper we published last November looks quite prescient in the light of the Charlie Hebdo horror. The paper draws out the political implications of growing marginalisation and inequality, in an age when faith in political institutions is declining. It is especially interesting about the role of “divisive narratives” in corroding trust, solidarity and community.

One group

Now, however, thinking about Homerton and Hebdo, I want to focus a bit on the behavioural and social issues that help explain the politics. For the gang members who knifed a teenager on Tuesday, and that poor boy himself, and the killers who struck in Paris, along with other European youth drawn to the jihadis and wanting to fight in Syria, as well as with those who wouldn’t go themselves but support or sympathise with those who do – all of them are part of the same group.

The biographies of the Paris killers have already started to be dissected. Here’s Britain’s Daily Mail: “Paris jihadis were orphan petty criminals.” Losers, dopeheads, criminals, marginal – then jihadis. The Guardian has a predictably more measured tone but it’s basically the same story there:

“… poor school records and chaotic family lives… deprived corners of the surrounding 19th arrondissement in north-eastern Paris… a patchwork of high-rises troubled by gang turf-wars…mainly unemployed or in small jobs… involved in petty crime, theft, drugs, trafficking. But then they met a young charismatic guru.”

Cause / No cause

Maybe it’s about there that the tale of the jihadis and the tale of the gang-members diverge. Maybe both found places to go, probably with strong-looking leaders, and that seemed to help them get a sense of belonging and a degree of self-respect. But one went to something that could depict itself as a cause and the other did not.

With the aid of a cause, most have been going off to Syria and Iraq. Some few have brought the violence from the margins into the centre of the societies where they live: March 2004 in Madrid, July 2005 in London, last week in Paris. Without the cause, in the gangs, violence tends to stay mostly in the margins. It is at least equally destructive for society.

Some years back as the financial system crashed, advanced economies burned, unemployment soared and strife ignited, there started to be expressions of concern about people who were turning 20 around then becoming “a lost generation.” Amid the wastelands of austerity Europe, with unemployment, under employment, low paid and unrewarding work, and in the UK with the special iniquity and permanent insecurity of the zero hour contract, it is easy to recognise the members of the lost generation.

Or as a French analyst said when referring to Wednesday’s killers, “Les enfants perdues de la République” – the lost children. They are the same. Jihadis are motivated by what they see as the injustice the West perpetrates against the divided world of Islam. Some of that injustice is real, some not. And real or not, it doesn’t matter compared to knowing that murder is murder and murder is wrong.

But motivation is not the whole story. What creates a pool of possible jihadis among whom the killers can be found by somebody who is clever and ruthless enough – that is equally important. And what creates that pool is largely what creates the pool of possible gang members. The journey they take has the same starting point, some comparable milestones along the way, if a different destination.

At some point, in France and Britain and throughout Europe, if we want ultimately to dry jihadi recruitment to less than a trickle, if we want my son’s friends to grow up with a much reduced risk of finding the gangs attractive, if we want peace in our societies, whatever else we do we will have to address the pressures of marginalisation, rising inequality and aggressive masculine role models that combine to push the young into losing their way. And to return to the larger scale, that had better be part of a global process easing inequality down or the people of Nigeria and elsewhere will have little chance of release from the horrors that now threaten.

It is one thing for some of the world’s leaders to march for freedom of expression. Well done that they did so, even if some of them were being more than a little hypocritical. But freedom of expression should be used to help build a more just and fair world. Let millions march for that too.

]]>http://dansmithsblog.com/2015/01/13/homerton-and-hebdo-thoughts-on-violence-in-and-from-the-margins/feed/5dansmithxzBombing in the Middle East again: three easy questionshttp://dansmithsblog.com/2014/10/08/bombing-in-the-middle-east-again-three-easy-questions/
http://dansmithsblog.com/2014/10/08/bombing-in-the-middle-east-again-three-easy-questions/#commentsWed, 08 Oct 2014 08:39:15 +0000http://dansmithsblog.com/?p=1823Continue reading →]]>The West is a couple of weeks into the latest air campaign in the Middle East, targeting the group we know among other names as ISIS. It is too early to see an outcome on the ground. The first test of its success is Kobane on northern Syria’s border with Turkey. As the fighting goes on, it seems the bombing could not halt ISIS’ continuing advance to the town though there are claims it has started to have an impact on the street-to-street fighting. Amid the uncertainties on the ground, three questions remain relevant.

With apologies

In case anybody is offended by the apparently flippant tone of these questions, apologies in advance. It’s a product of frustration at the way these issues are debated in the UK and elsewhere: Here they are:

1. Has the West ever done anything like this before in this region?

2. How did that go?

3. What is the definition of madness?

Now read on.

ISIS

We need no reminding that ISIS has taken over parts of Iraq and Syria and has declared itself the caliphate and Islamic State. Likewise, we know it revels in promoting itself worldwide with videos displaying its brutality and barbarism. It is a truly awful organisation even if, lest we forget, it has not killed nearly as many people as the Assad regime has in Syria.

We should need equally little reminding that despite its name and claims, the organisation does not represent Islam. It has been condemned repeatedly by leading Muslims including British Muslim leaders and Egypt’s senior religious authority. Its declaration of a ‘caliphate’ – the establishment of the authority of the Prophet Mohammed’s successor over all Muslims – lacks all credibility and has been denounced by representatives of almost every strand of Muslim opinion. Its actions are justified by nothing except its leaders’ and fighters’ twisted view of the world.

The case for air strikes

These points are important because they combine to make the core of the case for the West, together with some Arab allies, to use military force against ISIS. Some advocates put a few layers round this core, primarily the argument that if we do not fight them “over there”, we will end up having to fight them “over here”. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has spoken to the UN General Assembly about ‘the mortal threat we all face’ from ISIS. The extra layers seem to be quite popular, appealing to fears that have real foundations if one thinks back to bombs in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005.

In their simple, everyday politics form, these additions are not especially persuasive. It is not clear exactly why ISIS would attack the West if the West did not attack it but terror strikes in response to attacks on it seem a rational response and quite likely. And if Western actions defeat ISIS on the battlefield, why that would make clandestine terror actions impossible is also unclear. More likely, an inability to win on the battlefield will make clandestine terror a more attractive tactic. Suppress the problem in one place and it will appear in another. Its ability to do this should not be doubted thanks to international recruitment and because it is the richest group of its kind in the world, while successful strikes by the West give it a clear motive. In short, ISIS is more likely to be a threat “over here” if the West attacks it “over there” than if it is left alone.

A better case can be made, that, because it is actually seizing and controlling territory, it will have a profound impact on stability in the region. But the pragmatic, self-interested security case for the West’s military campaign is weak.

Such objections are not relevant, however, if you just focus on the core argument that ISIS is terrible and must be stopped. It has not been more eloquently or vividly expressed than by the avowedly anti-war Tim Stanley, who thinks ‘bombing rarely helps anyone’ but who, writing for The Telegraph blog, calls bombing Iraq ‘an act of mercy’. He puts it this way: “When a shark swims towards a group of people stranded in the water, what do you do? You shoot the shark. Conservation be damned.”

The shark and the people

But it’s not so simple. First of all, the shark is not heading towards the people, it’s already among them and looks a lot like them. Though ISIS has regular military formations, it is also in control of territory and functions by infiltration as well as frontal attack. This may be why President Obama has decided that the rules he imposed last year to prevent or at least minimise civilian casualties from drone strikes will not apply in the present bombing campaign against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. So the ‘act of mercy’ argument falls at its first and simplest hurdle: its impracticality, recognised at the highest levels, eliminates the action’s apparent moral clarity.

It might give advocates of air strikes some further pause for thought if they took note of reported scepticism among some of the very groups the strikes are intended to support – the Syrian opposition.

What would success look like?

Even if those difficulties did not exist, the strategic purpose and shape of the mission are unclear. Yes, to degrade and defeat ISIS – but exactly how? As Mehdi Hasan, UK political director of The Huffington Post,tweeted on the day of the House of Commons debate, ‘The definition of ‘victory’? In General Petraeus’ famous phrase: ‘Tell me how this ends.’ Can anyone?’

There are two components to the argument here: one is military, going from tactical aspects to strategic; the second is political. That air strikes alone will not suffice is a commonplace of current commentary, confirmed by a recent head of British armed forces. And as General Sir David Richards pointed out when saying air strikes would do not the job against a tank-equipped conventional enemy that is ready to fight, this does raise the issue of who will provide the rest of what’s needed.

On the ground: allies or boots?

In Syria the opposition to ISIS consists of Assad and allies whom the West won’t support, Islamist groups (including those allied with al-Qaeda) that the West hasn’t wanted to support though some of its Arab allies have, and a weaker opposition that the West has tried to support but which seems to be getting steadily less effective. Indeed, in Syria, which groups Western force will aim to support may still be an open question. Kurdish forces offer committed and solidly organised resistance to ISIS but their strength should not be over-emphasised. The Kurdish YPG militia has appeared unable alone to prevent ISIS entering Kobane.

In Iraq, the lavishly trained and equipped Iraqi army has proven wholly unable to resist ISIS. The Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq have a reputation forged out of long years of battle with Iraqi government forces but whether they remain as capable now as in earlier years has not been put to the test. In any case, they may be tougher defending their homeland than in mounting an offensive. Not surprisingly, then, the once reviled Mahdi Army, a Shi’a force against which US ire and force were concentrated repeatedly during the attempt to stabilise Iraq, has drawn some attention.

How strange, if the West’s best hope for protecting ourselves against the mortal threat of ISIS turns out to be Assad in Syria, and Muqtada al-Sadr and the forces of a would-be state the West has steadfastly refused to recognise for 90 years.

Or else, as General Richards said, there is always the possibility of Western Boots. On the ground. In Iraq. Again. And in Syria.

Politics, ideology and, of course, history

Beyond this warning that air power is not enough to achieve the military objective, the other thing that, as one commentator said, is a matter of ‘common sense and natural wisdom,’ is that nor will military power alone bring peace. Nor military power plus state-building on the lines of the US approach in Iraq since 2003 and Afghanistan since 2001. That the confrontation with ISIS has to be more than military seems, to be fair, well understood in the US administration but several commentators have pointed out that the track record shows US administrations ill suited to successfully operating with a more rounded approach.

More fundamentally, however, this is a political and ideological issue. ISIS sprang from al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006 and broke away in 2013. The roots of ISIS, like al-Qaeda, go back into networks of political militants and romantics in, above all, Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s. The driving forces behind their rise and continuing appeal will not be addressed and weakened without political change both in the Middle East and in relations between the West and the Middle East.

Broadly speaking and simplifying massively, they need accountable instead of arbitrary authority (that’s what the democratic movement of 2011 and since has been all about) while we – the West – need to behave with a bit of respect. Those two things would be a good start, at least.

But none of that is going to happen quickly. Instead, the arrogant West aligns with unaccountable Arab rulers. The unquestioned politics of it and the default resort to force get in the way of every other possible action to remedy deep-seated ills that these same actors have inflicted on the region over many decades.

The fog

And so we return to the uncertainties. The fog of war is swirling, made thicker by the foggy politics of Western intervention and even foggier Middle Eastern politics. There is a lot that is not known about what is happening on the ground. This is war and truth is always one of its casualties. Air strikes could slow ISIS and encourage the emergence of new coalitions of fighting forces in Syria and Iraq. In these wars, forces wax and wane because groups make transitional alliances of convenience. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there will be developments across the next few weeks that give grounds for those who advocate and those who are carrying out air strikes to feel optimistic and anticipate success. How long that optimism might endure is another matter. There have been optimistic moments before, not least in Iraq, several times.

Thus, my questions: have we been here before, with what results, and why does that not encourage our political leaders to think again?